SpaceX successfully launched another capsule carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station. While everything went as planned, the crew reported something out of the ordinary: a mysterious object floating past their craft as they approached the ISS.

“We saw an object that looked like a gnarled knob, although it’s difficult to tell with distance, in our centerline camera view from left to the lower right from our view,” Crew Dragon’s pilot Tom Marshburn told SpaceX Mission Control. “It is not visible anymore.”

“It could have been a small nut,” he added.

Was it space debris?

Mission Control told the astronauts that the knob wasn’t a threat and the rest of the flight proceeded smoothly, as per The Washington Post. The capsule docked at the ISS after a few moments, approximately 263 miles over the Caribbean.

It’s still unclear what the object really was – though it was very likely a piece of space debris that went past the capsule. Earth’s orbit is flooded with space junk from decades of international space travel. Still, it doesn’t mean it can’t be aliens.

Making plans for alien encounters

NASA’s top scientists even reached out to the scientific community saying that they need to make a plan in place for when humans find evidence of extraterrestrial life. James Green, the agency’s chief scientist, co-authored a new article that asks researchers to create a framework for reporting evidence of alien life.

SUNY Stony Brook astrophysicist Paul Sutter, on the other hand, wrote in a new column that the search for intelligent life among the stars should be stopped – though, he did not mean that we are alone in the universe.

“Humans have scanned and searched the heavens for signs of other advanced civilizations in the universe,” Sutter wrote. “And we’ve found nothing. Absolutely nothing. So maybe we shouldn’t be so focused on intelligent life but on any sort of life whatsoever.”